Rosecrans Baldwin's debut novel, You Lost Me There (2010) was a New York Times Editor's Choice and a hit with Open Letters Monthly's reviewer Liz Satterwaite, who called it "a very, very good novel and a fantastic fiction debut." His second book, a memoir called Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down (2012), was lauded both by Publisher's Weekly and by Open Letters' Steve Donoghue: "... in every scene of the book Baldwin displays the same prodigious writing skills that made his novel so memorably enjoyable."Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down has now been released as an eye-catching le Tricolor paperback from Picador, and Open Letters took the occasion to chat briefly with Rosecrans Baldwin about various things literary, starting with the conspicuously charmed entry he's had into the gator-pit of the publishing world.OLM: This is some start! Two books written, two books praised!RB: First off, and I'm not being falsely modest here, a lot of it has to do with luck – although both books got slashed and burned in some places. My dad called me up, “I saw a review of your book in the Wall Street Journal!" he said. "Really?" I said.“Yeah, they hated it!” And I'd think, "Gee thanks, Dad."OLM: And Paris, I Love You is a departure, yes? You're there in Paris working at an ad agency and working on your novel, when this memoir comes along?RB: The Paris book came as a sudden turn in the road, a turn I'm glad I took. My editor said,“You could turn this into a book," but it never occurred to me to write it as a novel – the book recounts a lot of events that actually occurred, and to write them as fiction would almost have diluted them somehow. It wasn't a story I would have told fictionally.OLM: Nonfiction tends to elicit very different reactions from readers than fiction does. Have you found this to be the case, at readings and signings?RB: I think people respond to it more, but it's a different depth of connection. The experience I particularly had with the novel is that something had been created between the readers and me. Whereas with the Paris book, I had suddenly had people who wanted to meet me because they'd been interested in the character of “me” in the book.OLM: No doubt also your fair share of Francophiles? People yearn for Paris in a way they don't yearn for Cleveland.RB: Paris is its own idea – it's more than a city, it exists in the universe as a dream, a fantasy. I wanted to show that the city of Paris and the day-to-day people can be of equal – or even much greater – interest than the postcard in everybody's mind.OLM: Paris has certainly inspired a great load of sententious prose in its time, and typical 'second books' are also usually characterized by great loads of sententious prose. Were you ever tempted to combine the two?RB: I think of the book as a Graham Greene-style "entertainment" – very different from what I was trying to do with You Lost Me There. At first I took a ton of notes and intended for a while to make Paris, I Love You a 400-page monster: “This. Is. What. Paris. Is.” But that didn't work, thank God.OLM: Even so, did you notice any similarities in the writing process itself?RB: Sometimes it took the same path, yes. For instance, I usually don't believe writers when they say their characters 'took charge' of their stories, I think that's an unstudied way to look at what they're doing. But in the Paris book, the story of [Baldwin's Rabelaisian co-worker] Bruno really did start to dominate, in ways I hadn't anticipated.OLM: The frequent pattern here is: "First book is brilliant, second book is a long morass, third book is delayed by 20 years." You've already defied that pattern once; without jinxing things by talking specifics, how about your third book?RB: I have plenty of faults and vices, but among my strengths – well, discipline is not a problem. Showing up is not a problem. Doing the work is not a problem.
